Sunday, June 07, 2015

The Post Reality Country

In the course of another very insightful post on Feminism by Stacy McCain [is he right that ‘Feminism is now undergoing a sort of nuclear meltdown’?], he also offers some penetrating thoughts on the horrific results of the triumph of Leftist Thinking.

A few highlights:

We now live in a world in which we are required to believe lies, where telling the truth is condemned as “hate,” and where strangers feel qualified to diagnose you as suffering from an irrational “phobia” if you refuse to cooperate with their political agenda….

This arises from the fact that Leftism rejects Reality — Life as it is — in favor of a Fantastical ‘Reality’ that was developed in the sterile laboratories of the minds of their philosophers, far away from the Real World. As Richard Pipes wrote of The Intelligentsia of France before their first Revolution:

For intellectuals of this kind, the criterion of truth was not life: they created their own reality, or rather, sur-reality, subject to verification only with reference to opinions of which they approved. Contradictory evidence was ignored: anyone inclined to heed such evidence was ruthlessly cast out.

This kind of thinking led to a progressive estrangement from life….

This estrangement is self-imposed because these kind of people cannot accept Human Beings as they are and the World as it is.

This essay from The Camp of the Saints is about feminism and the hold it has on Western culture. But this sort of magical thinking is everywhere. The other day President Obama proclaimed that thanks to his leadership, America is now the most respected country in the world once again. This could be passed off as another self aggrandizing lie by a politician who sees his policies fail and is trying to rally his base. But it could be that he believes it which means we have a mentally deranged President.